Pietro Beltrame

Ph.D. Candidate in Evolutionary Anthropology, School of Human Evolution and Social Change & Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University 

Fellow in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

I study the fundamental drivers of historical change, asking how technological innovation, institutions, and human agency shape the long-term evolution of societies. I treat the built environment as a spatial archive of cultural and social evolution, using it to generate evidence for periods and places where traditional records are sparse, particularly in premodern Europe. To do this, I combine remote sensing, geospatial analysis, and large language models to build fine-grained, large-scale datasets on historical architecture, including work that turns a millennium of European church building into quantitative data to trace long-run patterns of resource mobilization, technological diffusion, and the effects of institutional variation.